Die Mütze – 2023
Oil on canvas. H122 x W90 cm
The camp orchestra’s cellist practices.
Personal survival in a Death Camp was imperative and the ability to play a musical instrument meant a reprieve from selection for the gas chambers. However, this came at a huge cost. The Concentration Camp (KZ or KL) orchestra was forced to perform for the transports – as they arrived from all over occupied Europe. The intention of providing live music was to keep the new arrivals calm and lull them into believing there was a semblance of normality in the camp. This was a typical subterfuge deployed. No mention was ever made of the imminent death awaiting Nazi victims. This greatly facilitated SS selections for immediate murder in the gas chamber or, for prolonged torture via a tenuous life as slave labour – for untold tens of thousands of Romany, homosexuals, Russian POW’s and Jews. They also had to perform for the SS on demand.
Members of the orchestra were drawn from KZ inmates and although somewhat privileged, suffered privations, often psychological, along with the general camp population. The emaciated cellist depicted is purposefully painted naked (gender not clearly defined) and with head shaved, to symbolically intensify a general sense of vulnerability shared by the collective inmates’ suffering. In reality the members of the orchestra wore presentable clothing and were allowed to grow their hair.
The feet are depicted as large, filthy and grotesque, sharing the extreme basic camp conditions with other inmates, while the hands, being the conduit for producing delicate and subliminal sounds – are refined instruments in their own right.
The recognizable camp uniform hat (Die Mütze) hangs on a peg or nail on the wall of the barrack (Kaserne).
For me to address this issue has personal resonance. Extended family from Neustadt Sigund in Lithuania were murdered by the Nazis. I believe that the industrial scale of the holocaust is still the burning focus of history.
(My painting was inspired by the narrative of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch – Cellist and survivor of Auschwitz)
